In Australia, the educator landscape continues to be dominated by persons who are non-Indigenous, middle-class, speakers of English as their primary language and of European/Anglo cultural heritage (Daniels-Mayes 2016; Perso & Hayward 2015). When working with culturally minoritised learners, educators currently find themselves operating amid educational imperatives that are often complex and contradictory (Unsworth 2013). As foregrounded in chapters 3–5, cultural responsivity is a pedagogical approach that seeks to value, recognise and utilise the intelligence and cultural capacities that students already possess in the classroom (Morrison et al., 2019). This is a practice that requires educators to go beyond the limitations of simply being culturally aware, having cultural understanding or being culturally competent and instead seeks to tailor an educator’s practice according to learners’ unique place-based linguistic and cultural repertoires. In doing so, the eductor acknowledges through their practice that First Nations contexts are not all the same and that learners will often speak a range of differing home languages.

This chapter demonstrates how many Irish migrants in nineteenth-century colonial Australia met with overt discrimination, underpinned by a widespread circulation of racialized stereotypes of Irishness in popular culture, including in images in the mainstream media as well as in fiction. These racialized images of Irishness depended on widespread cultural knowledge of Irish stereotypes, such as stereotypes of Irish speech patterns, facial characteristics, and dress. At the same time, stereotypes of First Nations people and Chinese were also circulating in popular culture, often in the same frame or act as Irish stereotypes. While today many Australians of Irish descent pride themselves on the fact that their ancestors were less culpable in the racist policies and practices of colonisation in Australia, the reality is more complex as Michael D. Higgins, President of Ireland, recognised this is one of his first speeches on an official tour of Australia in 2017. This chapter analyses one element of that complexity by examining how Irish Australians have been represented in popular media and culture when in the same frame as two other racialized groups, First Nations people and Chinese Australians.

Australian novelist George Turner’s 1987 novel The Sea and Summer is one of the world’s first climate fiction novels, although James Edmond’s 1911 story, ‘The Fool and His Inheritance’, is a precursor to the genre. The early emergence of Australian climate fiction is not surprising given the country’s vulnerability to anthropogenic climate change. This chapter investigates the 35-year history of Australian climate fiction through an analysis of six novels, contemplating how environment, history and culture shape the use of genre, form and theme. It examines slow violence and flooding in The Sea and Summer; the intertwining of colonisation, environmental destruction and dispossession in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013); the use of the uncanny to explore the impact of ‘settlement’ in Jennifer Mills’s Dyschronia (2018); the effect of a changing climate on generations in James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and the psychological ramifications of the 2019–20 bushfires, evident through motifs of missing bodies and an invisible menace in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Inga Simpson’s The Last Woman in the World (2021). These novels, which are shaped by their production in a country with a fragile environment and a history of colonisation, offer varying visions of hope and despair.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) concluded that Canada had committed “cultural genocide” in government-supported residential schools that aimed to forcibly assimilate First Nations peoples since the nineteenth century. The TRC’s finding of cultural genocide in Canada can inform our understanding of American Indian boarding schools in the U.S. given the similarities and connections between the two systems. Both countries founded their schools with the aim of achieving total assimilation, or cultural genocide. Both, however, did much more than forcibly assimilate Indigenous youth. At the root of U.S. and Canadian Indigenous education project rests a genocidal truth: they may have committed all of the genocidal crimes enumerated in the UNGC. School administrators held people year after year with full knowledge of how lethal the schools were and an explicit plan to commit cultural genocide. This chapter demonstrates how scholars of the American Indian boarding schools can learn from the TRC, consider how we may evaluate the schools under the UNGC, and ultimately conduct additional data-gathering in order to reach a better understanding of what happened in these institutions.

Wampum beads are small beads made out of shellfish, typically the quahog clam, which were traditionally used by various First Nations in acts of ceremony, memory, and exchange. Often placed together on strings or woven into large belts displaying patterns, wampum was exchanged among various Indigenous nations of the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. It became a very important trade object with Europeans, who spread its use across colonial economies. For British writers in the eighteenth century, it was a perplexing material; for some it was understood as a form of currency, roughly translatable to a European economic system of monetary exchange.  Others understood wampum as writing, not legible to the European but which contained in its strings of beads a cultural history or account of a treaty negotiation, or more simply a pledge of fidelity. Its additional use as an object of adornment further complicated any stable understanding; as both text and commodity, sacred pact and ornament, wampum conflated systems of meaning and challenged European epistemologies. This chapter will look at various interpretations of wampum and will assess the epistemological challenges it placed to a society in which the lines between finance and culture were becoming increasingly blurred.

This chapter traces the dramatic geological history that created the terrain on which the nation of Canada is built; examines the theories on the origins of humans in the Americas; and summarizes the economic, social, and political practices that by1500 enabled diverse Indigenous inhabitants, made up of twelve major linguistic groups and more than fifty distinct cultures to thrive in the areas of northern North America that became the nation-state of Canada.

In this chapter the focus is on literacy and oral language development for bilingual learners, but all semiotic systems, including Auslan, the language of the deaf community, should be recognised and respected as a first language, the language which is the basis for developing literacy in any language.

This chapter starts by asking ‘What is in a Thing?’ It discusses the material presence of the past and its rediscovery, for example, in the history of commodities. Material culture history, it argues, has been critical of the linguistic turn but is still building on insights from it. It proposes that objects provide an ‘order of things’ (Michel Foucault), which is in need of examination and contextualisation. At the same time material culture history has also been in the vanguard of decentring human agency and problematising the ‘Anthropocene’. Using non-representational theory, it has been arguing in favour of recognising the agency of things and decentring human agency in history. Material culture history has also been pointing to the longevity of material objects, providing them with often malleable and multiple meanings. It is striking how prominent everyday objects are in material culture histories. Through them individual identities are often related to larger collective identities. Historians of material culture have contributed to raising our awareness of the link between objects and collective identity formation. Examples from national history, environmental history, first nations hsitory, the history of ethnic minorities, colonial history, cultural history, design history, architectural history, regional history, class history, gender history and religious history are all discussed in oder to underline the potential of material culture history to lead to greater self-reflexivity among historians about their role in constructing forms of collective identity and to deconstruct these identities.

One prominent way for multiple legal orders to be organized is for one order to claim and to an effective degree enjoy supremacy over the other(s). This is of course a familiar state-centric view of law. Such a view depends heavily on a particular concept of legal system, which has been both substantially developed in legal theory (e.g. in analytical legal philosophy) and observationally available in the practices of many states. However, this system-centred view of law faces some significant challenges in many contexts, in terms of both its descriptive-explanatory accuracy and its political acceptability. This chapter explores the way and extent to which the system-centred view of law is not necessary but contingent and so a matter of choice, and the political implications at stake in such a choice. Deploying a previously developed inter-institutional theory of law, it argues that forms of entangled legalities, rather than hierarchical and dominating legal systems, are often not only possible but politically desirable. To make the case it draws on observations about the dynamic and evolving relations between state and First Nations legal orders in Canada.

This chapter considers the concept of social and emotional wellbeing in mainstream mental health services by deliberately approaching mental health from within an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander context, rather than the standard biomedical perspective. It discusses the political, social and cultural determinants of First Nations social and emotional wellbeing and how, throughout history, these have contributed to a stigma surrounding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. The chapter emphasises the importance of cultural connection in improving social and emotional wellbeing, and suggests prioritising cultural connection to people and place, culture and the natural environment when treating First Nations patients. Social and emotional wellbeing is discussed within the context of mainstream mental healthcare, calling for trauma-informed care and a strengths-based approach. The chapter explores various threats to social and emotional wellbeing, including Sorry Business and Sad News, and imprisonment, before suggesting ways for healthcare professionals to promote social and emotional wellbeing in their care of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.